I have a very tasty recipe for noodle kugel, one of my favorite dishes around this time of year. It’s full of carbs and fat and sugar, which is why I only make it as a seasonal dish, because eating it year-round would be deadly. Today I made some for a holiday potluck party.

The recipe I use calls for cream cheese, eggs, and milk. It specifies full-fat cream cheese, but says that any kind of milk may be used, even soy milk. We didn’t have enough dairy milk on hand for the whole thing, but I did have a package of Vitasoy Holly Nog soy milk. Though it may seem a bit odd to mix soy milk and eggs and dairy — and egg nog-flavored soy milk at that — it really worked. In fact, it might have been the best noodle kugel yet!

I brought it to the party tonight and many people enjoyed it heartily. My favorite comment: “It’s Jewish Christmas on a plate!” I just might make it this way every time.

I’ve been making a lot of bread recently, because I had a lot of flour. So I’ve been trying a lot of different recipes in the bread machine. I’ve also become really addicted to watching TED talks; and I actually enjoy spending 7-15 minutes watching their daily new talk; I’ve been watching a lot of things that I might not seek out in an attempt to , and frequently, I find a lot of value for 15 minutes commitment.

So, those two things overlapped, and the other day I found myself watching this lovely talk by artisian breadmaker Peter Reinhart, done at Taste3 2008.

So last week I got a second copy of The Sweet Potato Queens Book of Love, which is funny, and has recipes in it that are southern, and so COMPLETELY BAD FOR YOU. I was leafing through it and I saw this one, for a thing simply called ‘Chocolate Stuff’ (it apparently is a pudding like thing, but no one ever asks the author for it by name, they just ask her to make ’some of that chocolate stuff’, and thus…)

This recipe is deceptively good. Like, you will make it, and you will say, ‘what the hell?’ because it is so good, and it’s so simple that my roommate said, ‘Man, that’s hardly even really baking.’ When this roommate first tried it, he actually had the, ‘eyes close, roll up, you moan ‘Oh, god” chocolate response, and I’ve never seen that from a straight man before. He and I ate half the pan in about 10 minutes after it came out of the oven.

• 2 eggs
• 1 cup of sugar
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1 stick of butter
• 2 heaping tablespoons cocoa (I really heaped them; it was prolly more like 3)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• nuts (optional)

Beat two eggs with a cup of sugar and a half cup of flour. I did this in my mixer to get it really well mixed and slightly fluffy. But not meringue fluffy. In the microwave I melted the butter with the cocoa, and then beat them with a fork until smooth. Dump the butter/cocoa into the egg/sugar/flour and then added the vanilla, and blended it some more. If you add nuts, you’d stir them in now (it’s a southern recipe, so they should be pecans).  Pour this into a loaf pan, then set loaf pan in a pan of water, and cook at 300 degrees for (according to the book) 40-50 minutes. I wound up going a little longer; the book describes it as having a slightly crunchy top, and at 50 minutes, it seemed a little soft yet, so I gave it 10 more minutes.

It’s sort of like a brownie, but imagine a brownie where every bite has both the crunchy edge bits and the gooey melty bits. Warm was good, it was even fabulous cold this morning; it retained both the soft gooey underside and the crunch, even covered overnight.

So a few weeks ago, I put together my points from Shaw’s (a local grocery store for those not in the northeast), and realized I had almost enough to get a free turkey from them. So I did what any good little cheapskate would do, and sent out the request for my friends’ points. People responded in spades (I wound up freecycling 5 back out). Now, Shaw’s was pushing this as ‘free Easter Turkey or Ham’, but since I don’t celebrate Easter, it turned out to just be a good excuse to cook piles of food for my friends.

It is golden brown and delicious.

This was my first attempt at cooking a turkey, and I’m afraid…I can’t be modest. People, this was one fine turkey. While the house certainly isn’t a Rockwell dwelling, this turkey looks every bit the Rockwellian turkey. I can’t take credit for this; it was almost totally Alton Brown’s recipe. The only difference was that I threw in some grains of paradise into the brine, because I had them.

I was really, really impressed by what the brining did to it. I’ve had a brined turkey or two in the past, and they’ve been decent, but this little bird was born to soak up brine. The result was a really tasty bird, flavourful throughout, perfectly browned, and, IMHO, better looking than the one on the Food Network’s site (which looks awfully pimply to me). Everyone who was there who ate meat agreed it was a delight to eat, and I was really glad that my first turkey turned out to be such a success.

The Tart, on the other hand, was entirely my doing. At Arisia this year, I hit Auntie Arwen’s Spices on dealer’s row. She does some excellent spice blends, that I enjoy trying, and also caters to the SCA crowd with spice mixes based on cookbooks from the middle ages. One of these, which does not appear to be on her site, is Pouldre Fine, a sweet/hot blend with ginger, raw sugar, cinnamon, grains of paradise and cloves, from Le Menagier de Paris, a cookbook from 1393. I bought it on a complete whim, and then tried to figure out what I might make with it. After about ten minutes of tasting and sniffing, it occurred to me it would be really glorious on broiled pears.

The Pear Tart, before cutting. If you click, there's really great close up.

Thus, we come to the Pear Tart. I wish I had a recipe for this, but I didn’t keep close tabs on it’ it was a pretty freeform tart, prepared the night before the dinner. The crust was simply phyllo dough, from the grocer’s freezer, thawed and prepared according to instructions (phyllo sheet, butter, phyllo sheet, butter, etc.). Because one guest is diabetic, and another is has issues with her glycemic load, I chose to experiment with agave syrup, which turned out to be a wonderful choice; it’s very light and was perfect for this dish. I melted 4tbsps of butter in 1 cup of agave syrup, and then I added the Pouldre Fine to the syrup, a tablespoon at a time until I felt it was hot enough; I wanted something with a little bite to offset the pears and agave. I eventually wound up at 3tbsps, and I think if I had been cooking for myself, or for a Hot Foods party, I might have gone to 4 or 5. I peeled and cored the pears, and sliced them about 1/4″ thick. I did one layer, poured a third of the butter/syrup over them, then did another level of pears, and poured the rest of the syrup over that, and sprinkle the top with a dusting of the Pouldre.

It baked for 30m in a 350 degree oven, and then for a few minutes longer, as it was just setting then; this is one of those stages where you just need to test it a little and see if it’s looking right, a little at a time.

I whipped mascarpone with a little agave syrup and some vanilla extract (made it myself! ) and left it overnight in the fridge to set. I’m definitely going to make it again later in the season when the pears are ripe.

Food is a measure of love, sometimes in surprising ways.

My father is from Lancashire, England. He moved to Canada in 1962 because things in England were pretty recessed in the 50s and 60s, and he thought it looked pretty good, and they were encouraging good upstanding citizens of other Commonwealth countries to come. A few years later, he met my mother while they were both gadabout 20-somethings living the high life in urban Toronto (for the life of me I will never know what turned their urban loving selves into people who thought Kitchener was too big, so they moved to Tillsonburg, Ontario. They seem to think I’m joking when I blame encroaching senility). They married in 1967, as far as I can tell because all their friends had started breeding by then, and they had no one to hang out with (I am the youngest firstborn of all my parents friends from their youth by about 5 years).

My mother decided, a few months after they married, to make my father a ‘traditional English Sunday meal’. I find it interesting, but fulfilling, that when you look up ‘sunday roast‘ on Wikipedia, you are in fact told that this - roast beef, mashed potatoes, carrots and beans, and Yorkshire pudding - is a tradition. She was bang on the money on what was in a British Sunday dinner.

The problem is my mother had never had one. Most of it is actually pretty straightforward; roast and gravy, it was the mid-60s so you just boiled the veggies, and we have very good potatoes in Canada for the mashing. But my mother had never had Yorkshire pudding. She found a recipe for it, and made it, but since she didn’t have the slightest idea what it was actually supposed to be like, she sort of guessed at the finished texture.

I was 16 before I realized that Yorkshire pudding wasn’t supposed to be thin and crispy; the recipe said to cook in a baking pan, by which it meant something like a muffin tin, but she was Canadian, and assumed a pan like a cookie or pizza pan. My father was so incredibly touched by what she had done that he couldn’t tell her she’d made a mistake, and so for the next 20 years he ate Yorkshire pudding that crunched like crackers, and didn’t tell a soul.

I always know my parents love each other, because of she did for him…and what he did, for her, over a Yorkshire pudding.